For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the evolving challenges to free expression impacting writers and intellectuals globally.
Communication has never been easier or more universally distributed. There are more than five billion active mobile phones worldwide—the majority of them smartphones. People have unprecedented access to information and the ability to share it, potentially reaching vast audiences with a single viral post on WhatsApp or WeChat. But the same computing technologies that enable those links have also enabled new tools to shape the messages we see and send — or cut them off entirely. The simple promise of the internet as a tool of free expression has darkened as private companies and governments have gained the power to monitor and control speech with a thoroughness, speed, and ubiquity unimaginable a generation ago.
This May, PEN America began a new, two-year project to catalogue the threats currently faced by writers and public intellectuals. The project, funded in part with a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, will document and produce a database of writers and other public intellectuals around the world facing threats such as intimidation, violence, censorship, arrest, and legal prosecution.